The Wood Ape

No doubt about it, Tuolumne County is Bigfoot Country. This region is known to have one of the the highest concentrations of Wood Ape activity in the country. There have been hundreds of reports from Pinecrest alone and nesting sites have been found on Big Hill just a 100 feet or so from the road.
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Visitors renting cabins in Twain Harte have been kept awake by the howling and whoops of Wood Apes. The town hosts their own Bigfoot Festival each year. A little further up the road, a 9 foot Bigfoot statue stands in front of the Strawberry Store carved from a massive cedar log.

Known to the Indigenous Miwok tribes as the Yayali, an outcropping of white rocks near Columbia, said to be the bleached bones of a Yayali, commemorates the place where a particularly vicious Wood Ape was slain. According to a 1859 article from the Daily Alta California, some five or six miners were sleeping in a barn up Lyons-Bald Mountain Road when a shape of a huge man arose from the hay and began tossing bales around as if they were light as feathers. For several nights the miners tried to reclaim their sleeping quarters but the creature kept chasing the lodgers from the barn.

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In 1963 sheriff’s deputies organized a two-day hunt trying to track down a 10 foot “monster” described as 'mostly hair’ that had actually bluff charged a patrol car near Cold Springs. They found fresh footprints and followed them but eventually lost the trail at Jenness Park. Reports from the sheriff's office set the size of the prints at 15 to 17 inches. In the early 1970’s, a pair of Wood Apes began visiting a hunting camp in the high country. The Sierra Sounds, also known as the Berry/Morehead tapes, are Bigfoot vocalizations recorded by the hunters.

​If you have your own encounter with a Wood Ape, you can leave a message at the Rawhide Saloon in Jamestown for local Bigfoot Researcher Jerry Hein and he will take your report.

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